Debating Capitalist Dynamics and Unfree Labour: A Missing Link?

Examined here are recent contributions to an important and longstanding debate in political economy, about the link between capitalist development and the employment of unfree labour. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. However, it is argued here that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from those identified earlier by Marxist theory. The exclusion of the latter approach from the debate is thus unwarranted.